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How to catch Permit in Florida
Permit feed in 70–90°F water and bite best at 74–86°F. Fish Scouter's season calendar follows them in 6 waters; in October they are at their peak in The Florida Keys, Miami & Biscayne Bay.
About
The permit: a pompano the size of a dinner plate with a black sickle tail, the hardest fish on the flats to feed and a wreck fish that spawns on the nearshore wrecks in spring.
How to fish it
On the flats, a live crab or a crab fly landed soft in front of a tailing fish. On the wrecks, a live crab drifted back on the current. Either way, the eat is the whole game.
What it eats
Live bait for it
Blue crabsWhole and small for permit and tarpon; halved or quartered on the bottom for black drum, redfish and cobia.
Live shrimpUnder a popping cork or free-lined, hooked under the horn on a #1 to 2/0 circle hook; on a jig head for the bottom. The universal inshore bait.What to fish it with
the sizes that fish itThe rule
not confirmed hereSpecial Permit Zone rules apply in south Florida; catch-and-release in the SPZ during the spawning season; confirm at MyFWC.
The current rule at MyFWC →Where it is, month by month
Permit are homebodies with one big trip a year. Tag returns from the Keys and Biscayne show most fish caught again within a few miles of where they were tagged — the same flats, the same wrecks. Then, from March into August, peaking May through July, they leave the flats for the reefs and wrecks to spawn around the full moon in schools of 50 to 200 that come back to the same structure every year. Western Dry Rocks off Key West is the famous site; acoustic tags have caught flats fish showing up there on the summer moon. Off southwest Florida the aggregations sit mostly on federal-water wrecks from Naples to Tampa. After the spawn the fish drift back to the flats, and late summer into early fall is the best flats permit fishing of the year. Winter pushes them to the deeper wrecks and channels until a warm spell. It's essentially a south Florida fish — a few show on the Texas rigs and the Carolina wrecks in summer — and inside the Special Permit Zone the spawning season is catch-and-release, so check MyFWC.